The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be. Let's talk about it.

Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for being here.

When I'm releasing this episode, if you're listening right around that time, you are probably right around your recital time, the end of the typical dance season, the typical school year, and we generally have some kind of final performance and then might move into a summer session or a break of some sort. But at some of the studios that I've taught in in the past, and I'm sure for many of you, after that final showcase or recital happens, many of us still have one or sometimes a few weeks of dance classes left. And as a teacher, you can be in total burnout mode.

All of your mental and physical energy might have gone into that recital that you just pulled off and stepping back into class again, the very next week can be so exhausting. Plus, you have your students also feeling the same way like they just poured everything into their recital. Now they're coming back to class.

They probably don't even know what to expect, what's going to be asked of them. They're so used to using that time to work on skills and steps and choreography towards the recitals. They're like, what do we do now? And you might even get some pushback or some attitude about pushing the students because they are also in that same kind of burnout mode.

So having been in this boat before, I have a few ideas of what you can use this class time for in the last couple weeks of class if it's after the recital or honestly, even if it's before the recital, but you just feel like you don't want to use all of your class time towards working on recital dances. Maybe you feel like it's too much. Maybe you are getting to that burnout stage where continuously running and cleaning the choreography doesn't feel like the right fit for class time.

You can absolutely use these ideas too. And I'm going to come at this total brainstorm style, just kind of shouting out different ideas and things that I've used or seen used or think might work well. And again, if you're in that mode where your brain is just like shut off because you used so much to get through the last couple of weeks, that's what this episode is for.

That's what I'm here for. Like just listen, take the ideas that work for you. You can jot them down if you want to, or just take them into the studio.

They're designed to be the least amount of work for you as humanly possible. Okay, so step one, this is a tradition from a previous studio that I worked at. I thought it was really fun.

They recorded the recital as many of us do. And while there were still classes in session after the recital, at least one of those classes was dedicated to just watching the recital. Now, for many of us with longer dance recitals, that could take a few classes to watch the whole thing.

You might want to watch back portions of it, but there's also a lot that you can do outside of just like plopping down and watching the whole recital start to finish to use it as an educational tool without having to do a lot of extra work. So similar to how competitions will send you back videos with the judges feedback in real time, you could have the students watch back just their own dance that they did in the recital and give themselves feedback. So have them watch and either write down or share verbally three things they thought they could have done better, three things that they thought they did really well, their favorite part, and the step that they feel they most need to work on to improve for next season.

You could have them come up one at a time and practice being a judge and do like a mock judging thing where you show their recital dance over and over again. And each student has their own opportunity to stand up at the front of the room while the dance is playing in real time and give commentary. If you don't have a video of the dance yet when you're stepping back into class, this can also be done by having the students perform the dance again in class.

Hopefully they're not bored of it. I think you can kind of feel out which classes would be excited to come back into the class and still continue to work on the dance they just did in the recital and which classes would rather put it past them. But if you feel that they're up for it, you can have them do the dance again.

And one student step out of the group at a time and give a live commentary as they're watching their peers perform. Or you could also have them get into small groups or write about this privately or just share their feedback in a sort of circle discussion style where they just reflect back on their performance and share what they really liked, what they felt they could have done better. Did they mess anything up and how can they prevent doing that in the future? How did they feel doing the dance? You could also use that as a prompt to say, hey, you practice the choreography the same way over and over and over again every time.

But if you were the choreographer, what would you change? And do a workshop style class where you give them one section of the dance and they're allowed to change it, adjust it, show you what they would do differently to help them get in touch with their own artistry, what they connect with as a choreographer, and maybe also do that in a group setting. So you're working on peer interaction and positive group collaboration. The rest of these ideas are all putting that recital dance behind us and just moving on to other things.

If you still want to do a video, but not of the recital, there are lots of great documentaries about the history of different dance styles, different dance icons. Miller Dorey, who you might know on social media as Back to Great and was a former pro dancer who's kind of getting back into dancing and chronicling that on social media, has this great podcast called Hey Dancer and shares these episodes that are right around 20 to 30 minutes a piece, telling the stories of different famous dancers from throughout history. So showing a video like that and just giving them a little bit more time, you know, I've talked about showing video clips like two, three minutes at the beginning or end of class as an additional tool to help with the work that you're doing in class, but giving them a little bit more time to delve into the history, the culture, a full breakdown of elements of technique that you can find on YouTube, on Netflix, on podcasts, or pull out the old DVD player, right? That can be a great tool and give them a little time to settle and just think about dance in a different way.

If you are coming into a break season, another thing that I think can be really valuable to introduce at the end of the season is things that the students can do on their own to make sure that they're taking care of their body throughout the season where they're not coming into class every day. So for example, doing a cross training day where you introduce different cross training routines that they might be able to practice on their own, yoga, Pilates, weightlifting, healthy stretching regimens, those types of things. You can introduce in a class or a series of classes or set it up in stations where they're moving around to different stations to learn about different practices.

I also love the idea, A, if you can get outside and the weather is nice. I know that that's not going to be feasible for everyone, could be safety issues, you know, all sorts of things. So I don't want to push that unless you really have a very clear safety plan of how everyone's going to be accounted for, where you're going to do that that is safe for the dancers.

And if you need tips about safety, we do have an episode about that with Andy Roszak, and he is like the guru in the field of school safety and emergency preparedness. So I will link that in the show notes. But anyway, all of that to say, if you can feasibly get outside, or even if you can't get outside, get into some different kind of space.

There's a huge benefit just like mentally, emotionally, creatively to the dancers having the opportunity to move outside the parameters of the studio. So like yoga on the lawn, stretching outside, site specific dance, playing around with improvising, interacting with a new space, all of those things can be really fun. And you can really give the dancers the opportunity to play in those settings.

So you don't have to do a ton of prep work, just kind of see how they interact with the new space. And it can be a lot of fun. And we have some other resources for those types of classes to in previous episodes, I'll try to throw a few of these in the show notes for you.

Because again, if you're in that burnout mode, and you don't want to have to think too much, you can just go into the show notes and click and listen through a few episodes for ideas. I'm sure that can be really helpful. We recently had a meditation and mindfulness episode with Amanda Couturier-Cormier, and she shared about how she incorporates meditation and mindfulness practices into the dance classroom.

And she actually has a Patreon page with different prompts that she shares where you can just download the recording of her walking you right through a meditation. So no work at all for you, you could put something like that on, take your students through a meditation and then have them share their feedback about how they're feeling going into the break time or the next season or whatever it is. You could have them do some creative movement or some improv, kind of reflecting back trying to get grounded back into their bodies as not just a tool for the recital, but as really being their own.

Or you could lead them in some fun and silly improv prompts and games and things to keep it really fun and light, but also give them that creative output, that creative opportunity, and allow them to explore movement with maybe different props, mirroring other students, moving as a group, things like that. If you like that idea of keeping it really fun and light and sort of gamifying that last class or couple of classes, I've heard from other dance teachers that they do the dance Olympics, and everyone does this a little bit differently, but you have different events and the dancers are competing amongst themselves for some kind of prize, which can be really silly and off the wall. You can make it up on the spot and just say like it's a certificate of awesomeness and write it on a piece of paper right on the spot.

Those can be like skill tests, like who can balance the longest, who can do the most turns, who can jump the highest, things like that. A lot of studios are also set up with things that you can really easily use for obstacle courses, like going under the bars, balancing on some kind of balance ball or something like that, walking across certain things, jumping over some things, so just grabbing random items from around the room, and setting up an obstacle course that fits with the skill level of the class that you're teaching. Maybe if you're wanting to lean into conditioning, it could be who can do the most reps of various different exercises, anything that you can do to kind of gamify.

Make sure to keep it, of course, very light, you don't want there to be any sort of high stakes competition among the dancers where anyone's getting jealous. But maybe even if it's like, this is how many I think you can do. And if anyone in the class exceeds that, or if the majority of the class exceeds that, then the whole class gets a reward of some kind that can be really fun without actually pitting the dancers against each other.

I also love the idea which has come up I think now in a couple of previous episodes, and I always say when a guest mentions this, okay, but when are we going to do this? There just doesn't seem to be time. But this is that time where you have a little bit more leeway. Now you're not working towards any one specific end goal.

And so to wrap up, you might want to hold a mock audition, where the dancers come in, you give them a number, you kind of walk them through what the audition process will look like, and then test their skills that way. But again, the stakes are really low, it's a light hearted class, you can give them some feedback at the end to help prepare them for real auditions in the future, while they're still feeling like it's kind of fun and it's a little bit of a game. And if you need other super easy dance games, especially for the younger ones, preschoolers, elementary schoolers, I have a number of episodes with dance games that take absolutely no prep that you can just do on the spot, dance games that I've purchased that I would recommend as being great to bring into the classroom.

I've done a lot of that on the podcast before, so I'm not going to rehash all of that. But once again, check those show notes, there's gonna be a big old list, but I will make sure that I clarify which episodes will give you ideas for which things and for dance games, I will have a couple of different episodes linked in the show notes below. Now, if you are listening to this, and you still don't have what you think you need to kind of comfortably wrap up the season, have a fun last couple of classes.

If you have questions about how I've implemented any of these ideas, anything like that, I am very easy to reach you can find me in the casual dance teachers network Facebook group on Facebook, obviously. Or you can follow me on Instagram at the casual dance teachers podcast. I am also on Reddit as the casual dance teachers you can find me there.

Please reach out to me let me know what questions you have or if you're doing some fun stuff for your last class or couple of classes that you would love to share with other dance teachers that we can implement in our own classes. I hope this helps. I hope you're feeling good in this season.

I know it's crazy. And if you couldn't tell, it's kind of crazy for me too. So I thought I would keep this episode really quick and light and easy for myself to get recorded and edited and out to you and that's okay.

These things can still be really helpful, really useful and you never know how it's going to impact somebody. So remember that for yourself and for your students as well. With that, I would like to close with one of my favorite quotes from Maria Montessori, play is the work of the child.